Private fleets for hire – a great idea but does it work? Logistics Management reports on the efforts of private fleets to hire themselves out for the back haul – maybe even contribute to the logistics budget bottom line.

The only problem with this is that it is a great idea but execution is the problem. I speak from personal experience. In my previous job at Genco, I worked on precisely this sort of opportunity with a host of private shippers – some really big names in there as well. It was called Genco Shipper Alliance.

The Shipper Alliance started in July of 2005 with Unilever as its first customer. Since this time, GENCO has put a tremendous amount of work into building the program and maintaining good working relationships with all shippers and carriers involved. Shipper Alliance, to be successful, had a dependency on shared assets and collaborative participation by all of the Alliance members. This support has become increasingly difficult to maintain with our customers in the current economic situation and has substantially changed the value proposition of the Shipper Alliance going forward.

The work I did was create the algorithms that created the tours that collaborators in the shippers alliance would use – so its mathematically feasible and with a bit of ingenuity it can be made real time as well. However, the reason why the plug was pulled is illustrative – whose truck, what load, who gets the final say?

About me

I am Chris Jacob Abraham and I live, work and blog from Newburgh, New York. I work for IBM as a Senior consultant in the Fab PowerOps group that works around the issue of detailed Fab (semiconductor fab) level scheduling on a continual basis. My erstwhile company ILOG was recently acquired by IBM and I've joined the Industry Solutions Group there.